From the mouths of ladies, poets and dogs

The Lady is Baroness James of Holland Park, also known as P.D. James; the dog is J.F. Englert's Randolph, narrator and reflective co-protagonist of three novels; the poet is W.H. Auden, and I've come across interesting words from each recently on the appeal of mysteries.

Englert, via Randolph, gives us this in A Dog About Town:

"W.H. Auden ... He too had faced a New Year filled with doubt and dark musings—the New Year 1940 when a great war loomed over the world. ... His words now flowed through my mind, a sad and graceful music:

The situation of our time
Surrounds us like a baffling crime.
There lies the body half-undressed
We all had reason to detest.
And all are suspects and involved
Until the mystery is solved.

And under lock and key the cause
That makes a nonsense of our laws ... "

James' Talking About Detective Fiction has any number of observations that will compel further reading, and that's based just on a short foreword and the first chapter. To wit:

"Because of its resilience and popularity, detective fiction has attracted what some may feel is more than its fair share of critical attention, and I have no with to add to, and less to emulate, the many distinguished studies of the last two centuries."

and

"So what exactly are we talking about when we use the words `detective story,' how does it differ from both the mainstream novel and crime fiction, and how did it all begin?"

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

No cats allowed ...

... but I'm going to make one more post about a dog, and you can't do a thing about it.

1) Recent discussion here came down against the covers of J.F. Englert's three novels narrated by a literate, reflective Labrador named Randolph. I complained that the covers might mislead readers into thinking the books cuter and cozier than they are.

In the covers' defense, though, they reproduce skillfully executed artwork, apparently commissioned for the books, if one can judge by Englert's thanks to illustrator Dan Craig. I've taken part in discussions of copycat covers, the phenomenon that results when different publishers rely on the same stock of photographic images. Why can't the publishers spend a few extra dollars for an artist, illustrator or photographer, and avoid looking cheap and cheesy? I asked. Englert's publishers do this. More power to them.

2) I also like a couple of bits inside the book, A Dog About Town, including:

"He crammed what looked like a Maryland crab cake into our deeply troubled refrigerator, the interior of which had remained a shadowland of petrified broccoli and pizza since the bulb burned out months before."

and

"His reputation in the writing life had been launched and sustained by this pedigree of mid-twentieth-century entitlement and superiority, which by the time of his death in the twenty-first century, was anachronistic."

and, for what it says about Randolph as a palatable contemporary vehicle for sentiments that might seem precious, dated or eccentric in the mouth of a twenty-first-century human fictional detective, this:

" ... the detective is the last true humanist, standing at that intersection where observation and reason meet emotion and intuition revealing the secrets that measure our fragile, inconstant, but extraordinary beings."

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

One more word about four-legged protagonists ...

... and then I'll return to my anthropocentric focus tomorrow.

Why read a book narrated by a dog without concealing the fact from your friends? If J.F. Englert wrote the book, because he chooses his words carefully. He narrates hilarious events in deliberately everyday language. He understates that which he might easily have overstated.

His Randolph, canine narrator and protagonist, is of scholarly temperament — a great reader when the opportunity presents itself, eager to communicate with humans but unable to do so save with great difficulty. Quite naturally, his contemplative turn of mind and bookish preferences result in occasional formality of speech in his address to us, the readers.

He has a voice, in other words, about all one can ask of a fictional character no matter how many legs he or she has.

***

Check this space tomorrow for a post about humans.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Good books, bad covers

Yesterday's post about J.F. Englert's A Dog at Sea mentioned in passing the book's cloying cover.

The covers to Englert's first two novels are borderline cutesy, I told a commenter, but the current cover goes over the top. More than that, it's misleading. Readers looking for a cute doggie book might be disappointed, and the cover might repel readers who would otherwise enjoy the intelligent story that lies within.

To ensure that you don't judge this book by its cover, here's an excerpt from A Dog at Sea. Here's a bit from Englert's A Dog About Town. Here's some graceful, amusing prose from A Dog Among Diplomats. Here's what I wrote about that last book.

And here's your question: What good books that you've read were ill-served by off-putting or misleading covers?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Good dog book!

(Photo © Susan Stava)

Back in 2008, I risked obloquy and ostracism when I read a book with an animal protagonist. But J.F. Englert's A Dog Among Diplomats was a pleasant surprise, a sharp, intelligently written tale leavened with enough wit and even melancholy to elevate it above the run of mysteries narrated by non-humans.

I am happy to report that, barring the cutesy cover with which its publisher has saddled it (not pictured here), Englert's new A Dog at Sea is off to just as promising a start. Never have I known an author so able to wring suspense and menace from an approaching plate of shipboard hors d'œuvres:

"The crew member sensed the pack movement in his direction and looked ready to retreat, but then a two-footed animal — a used-car salesman from Pasadena, California — gestured for him to approach ... "

(Read more about Englert and his protagonist, Randolph, here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Authorial savvy

I recently singled out J.F. Englert's entertaining and highly worthwhile A Dog Among Diplomats for its explorations of canine consciousness, particularly in a series of meditations on scent. I called those meditations "nice pieces of fantasy writing," but I realize they are probably also the result of clear-eyed planning on Englert's part.

I don't know Englert's thinking as he planned the book, but, having decided to make an animal his narrator, he obviously then had to decide how this animal would communicate with the book's human characters. This is where readers who blanch at the thought of animal characters may start to roll their eyes, queasy with visions of cute dogs yelping and trying to pull their masters back from walking unknowingly into perilous situations.

Happily, Englert's book has none of that. A hilarious dog book would have been filled with such scenes. A sentimental dog book would have mused upon the beautiful ways dog and man communicate. Englert, however, recognizes that such communication is fraught with uncertainty, to say the least, and he makes such difficulties a large part of the book. In that respect, A Dog Among Diplomats is rather realistic for a story with a fantastic premise.

Faced with a problem, in other words, Englert decided not to solve it, but to make the problem into the substance of his story. What other clever, realistic solutions to thorny narrative problems come to mind? What other writers have taken what might have been a stumbling block and made it instead into an important part of the story?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Technorati tags:
J.F. Englert

A Dog Among Diplomats, J.F. Englert

Detectives Beyond Borders has heretofore restricted itself to stories with human protagonists, and the policy has been fruitful; the supply of such stories is almost endless, and some of them are quite good.

Now comes J.F. Englert's A Dog Among Diplomats, and I am pleased to report that through its first 126 pages, it's better than I'd have expected from a mystery with a dog as an investigator.

Why is this? Because:

1) The dog in question, a Labrador named Randolph who belongs to an artist named Harry and who also narrates the novel, is no mere wry commentator on the cute foibles of silly humans. Instead, his narration explores canine consciousness in rich detail, particularly in a series of meditations on scent. These are nice pieces of fantasy writing.

2) The opening chapters are beautifully organized, each introducing a complication, resolving a conflict, and leading smoothly and easily to another.

3) The tone is breezy and amusing throughout, probably a more difficult feat than punctuating a story with the occasional knee-slapper. Here's one example:

"There was also — I began to recognize — another potent potpourri, of cinnamon, nutmeg and apple, emanating from dishes discretely placed on either side of an old wooden clock on the mantelpiece. This potpourri was called `Country Kitchens' and stunned the noses of man and canine in bed-and-breakfasts across the country."

4) There is a tinge of melancholy, just enough to act as a subtle counterpoint to the humor and hold this reader's interest. Here's an example that immediately follows the selection quoted above:

"This veneer of coziness, however, could not transform the essential nature of the place. Despite its upscale transformation and the utopian ideals of its proprietress, the boardinghouse was still a place of transience and disconnection — an urban way station filled with alien bodies in separate rooms."

There is poignance, too, to Harry's role in the book's central mystery, a mystery that justifies the novel's inclusion in a blog called Detectives Beyond Borders. More later.

P.S. A similar melancholy lurks in Ian Sansom's The Case of the Missing Books, only occasionally bubbling to the surface in the protagonist's growing disconnection from his girlfriend back in London. Such undertones help ensure that despite their lighthearted or even fantastic subjects, the books are no mere froth.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Technorati tags:
J.F. Englert